The present invention relates to color manipulation for digital image processing in the prepress industry where color images stored in the computer are visually displayed on an output device such as a video monitor or by a recorder or printer on a recorded or printed output. An HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance) weighted mask can be used for any color manipulation, e.g. weighted color corrections, automatic silhouetting etc. Changes visually observable on the output device are executed only in the region of the mask. The results correspond to the human perception of color changes.
As a result of attempts to introduce more intuitive color manipulation, a uniform HSL (or equivalent) neighborhood is created. This requires color space translations and does not allow weighted color change distributions. The data inside the neighborhood is selected for further changes and the data outside of it is rejected.
In this approach it is difficult to: 1) accomplish quality transitions between color spaces; 2) meet precision requirements; 3) achieve interactive performance; and 4) avoid the undesirable effects of binary weighting.